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Slaves Without Masters is a vivid and moving history of the quarter of a million free blacks who lived in the South before the Civil War. First published to great acclaim in 1974, Slaves Without Masters established Ira Berlin as one of the outstanding historians of African American life in slavery and freedom. It traces the lives of free black men and women, portraying their struggle for community, liberty, economic independence, and education within an oppressive society.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Slaves Without Masters rates with the best, for it combines careful scholarship, acute analysis, and an admirable historical imagination. -- The New Republic

About the Author

Ira Berlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park, where he lives. He is the author of Many Thousands Gone, Generations of Captivity, and Slaves Without Masters (The New Press). He co-edited Remembering Slavery (with Marc Favreau and Steven F. Miller), Families and Freedom (with Leslie S. Rowland), and Slavery in New York (with Leslie M. Harris), all published by The New Press. His books have won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Abraham Lincoln Prize, among many other awards.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

I guess I am not reading the same book as the other guy. I saw this book as well written, well reasearched, relevant and extremely factual. Berlin's entire book is based on nothing but facts, and he has tons of sources that he refered to. He hs a lot of great refrences, old news papers(which are interesting to read), cogress meeting records, the laws of that time, the census, and lots of other great forms of accurate facts. "Slaves Without Masters" exposed a lot about a time period in american life that was very interesting for a "free" African-American. The book is about the free negroes in the antebellem south, which in most southern states were between 60 and 80 percent of the "free" African-American population, this would explain why we hear a lot in this book about Mulattos. THE MAIN BENEFIT OF THIS BOOK IS THAT IN A DOCUMENT PROVEN AND FACTUAL WAY, EVEN "FREE" PEOPLE CAN BE SLAVES.

This book has all of the ins and outs of why Louisiana is just a little bit different... I wondered why Milliken Frazier, a free black from Coushatta, Louisiana would move over to Texas and sign up to be a slave for Jefferson S. Nash so he could be a pottery... Then wondered no more. It describes the climate in Louisiana at that time perfectly... Actually based on quite a bit of data. Nice 1974 take on the problem...